by Philip Short
Had the rest of the leadership joined together at that point to stop him, they might conceivably have averted the disaster bearing down on them. But to do so would have required them to confront Mao face to face, in the Politburo Standing Committee. None had the stomach for that kind of fight.
The same mixture of cowardice and self-interest that had made possible Peng Dehuai's fall at Lushan was still more pronounced in 1966. The sanctification of Mao and his writings, promoted assiduously by Lin Biao, had by then reached such undreamed of heights that to oppose him directly had become unthinkable. In any case, Mao left nothing to chance. Liu Shaoqi's absence until the eve of the Hangzhou meeting meant that there was no time to organise resistance, even had anyone wished to. The subsequent Politburo session in Beijing was enlarged, on Mao's instructions, to include sixty of his hand-picked supporters. Although they could not vote, their presence made reasoned discussion impossible.
Yet there were warning signs that should have told the leadership that this latest movement would be unlike any Mao had launched before.
The May 16 Circular had referred to ‘a revisionist line’ within the Party – a term which harked back to the epic struggles of the Party's early days, against men like Li Lisan and Wang Ming – and had predicted ‘a great revolution, more profound, more complex and more arduous’ than any undertaken in the past. Zhou Enlai had warned that it would ‘target the centre rather than the localities, … higher levels rather than lower levels’.31 The language of the polemics was more extreme, more emotionally charged – geared to whipping up a mob to frenzy rather than making a political case. Personal and political motives were from the start inextricably mixed. Mao's use of Jiang Qing, and of a coterie of personal trusties, and Lin's reliance on Ye Qun, reinforced this trend.
One other development in May might have alerted Liu Shaoqi to the plot that Mao was brewing.
Yao Wenyuan published a new polemic, this time attacking not only Wu Han but two of his collaborators – Deng Tuo, the one-time People's Daily editor whom Mao had excoriated in 1957 for failing to publicise the ‘Hundred Flowers’; and a novelist named Liao Mosha – who had worked with him in the early 1960s on a weekly satirical column entitled ‘Notes from a Three-family Village’. The column, Yao now claimed, had used Aesopian language to attack Mao by innuendo in the time-honoured Chinese tradition of ‘pointing at the locust tree in order to revile the mulberry’.32
The charge was almost certainly unfounded. Although, with hindsight, pieces with titles like ‘The Royal Way and the Tyrant's Way’ and ‘Amnesia’ (describing a mental disorder for which the only cure was ‘complete rest’) seemed written in such a manner that they could only apply to Mao – no one in China made that connection at the time, any more than anyone at the time had seen ‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’ as a defence of Peng Dehuai. Instead the essays were read as witty caricatures of lower-level officials whose stupidities had contributed to what were euphemistically called the ‘three years of natural disaster’ – which was no doubt all they were.
But the point of Yao's article lay elsewhere.
If a Politburo member, Peng Zhen, had been able to install a ‘black anti-Party, anti-socialist line’ opposing the Chairman's cultural policies; and if a group of Party writers had been able, for four years, to lampoon him with impunity in the public prints of the capital – why had the man Mao had placed in charge of the Party, Liu Shaoqi, done nothing to stop it?
There were only two possible answers. Either Liu was incompetent, or he was in league with Mao's opponents.
*
Having completed his preliminary dispositions, Mao set in motion the next stage of his infernal machination.
On May 14, Kang Sheng sent his wife, Cao Yiou, to Beijing University to make contact with the Party Secretary of the Philosophy Department, a radical firebrand named Nie Yuanzi.33 Ten days later, after Cao had given Nie assurances of high-level backing, she and a group of supporters wrote a wall-poster accusing the university president, Lu Ping, of having suppressed Mao's directives on the Cultural Revolution, and pasted it up on the same wall, outside the university canteen, where the ‘Hundred Flowers’ movement had blossomed, nine years earlier. It urged students and lecturers ‘resolutely, thoroughly, cleanly and completely to eliminate all demons and monsters, and all Khrushchev-type counter-revolutionary revisionists, and to carry the socialist revolution through to the end’.34
The University Party Committee, which Lu Ping chaired, went into overdrive. By next morning, hundreds more posters had appeared, most of them condemning Nie's group.
On June 1, the promised ‘high-level backing’ arrived.
Mao in person endorsed Nie's poster, and ordered it broadcast by radio stations throughout China. The People's Daily, which had been taken over two days before by Chen Boda, denounced the university as ‘a stubborn anti-Party and anti-socialist bastion’ and Lu Ping as the leader of a ‘black gang’.35 Nie became an instant celebrity. Telegrams of support poured in from all over the country. Students from other Beijing colleges flocked to the university to see her, and to seek guidance on how to deal with recalcitrant Party committees at their own institutes of higher learning.
Secondary-school pupils in the capital, led by the offspring of the elite (who heard from their parents of the political convulsions under way), moved even faster.
At the end of May, an enterprising, forever nameless pupil at the Qinghua University Middle School had coined the term hongweibing – ‘Red Guard’.36 The movement to which this gave rise spread through Beijing's schools like wildfire, fuelled by a campaign to adulate Mao that became more extravagant and outlandish with every passing day. Lin Biao had started it with a speech to the Politburo on May 18, when he asserted: ‘Chairman Mao is a genius … One single sentence of his surpasses 10,000 of ours.’37 The People's Daily then took up the cry: ‘Chairman Mao is the red sun in our hearts. Mao Zedong Thought is the source of our life … Whosoever dares to oppose him shall be hunted down and obliterated.’ Mao's works, it said, were ‘more precious than gold’; ‘every sentence is a war drum, every utterance a truth’.38
On June 3, two days after Mao endorsed Nie Yuanzi's poster, a new Beijing Party Committee was appointed to replace Peng Zhen and his ousted ‘black hands’, prompting ritualistic demonstrations of support in which enthusiasm was tempered by puzzlement, as the reasons for Peng's dismissal remained secret. Ten days later the government decreed that all schools and universities (and even kindergartens) should ‘temporarily’ close so that the students and staff could devote themselves full-time to class struggle.
Liu and Deng watched these developments with dismay and growing bafflement.
Already during the spring, there had been a foretaste of the ruthlessness with which the anti-revisionist witch-hunt would be pursued. The crippled Luo Ruiqing was brought in to struggle meetings in a wicker frame of the kind normally used to carry vegetables to market.39 After the publication of Yao Wenyuan's article, Deng Tuo committed suicide. Less than a week later, it was the turn of Mao's secretary, Tian Jiaying. Accused of obstructing the campaign against Wu Han, he, too, killed himself.40 Suicides had long been a common feature of political movements in China, but there had been no case of a senior Party official taking his own life since Gao Gang, in 1954. The deaths of Deng Tuo and Tian Jiaying were widely seen as the traditional Chinese scholar's way of protesting against injustice.
To these grim events within the political establishment was now added spiralling turmoil in colleges and schools.
Liu and Deng knew full well – having witnessed the effects nine years earlier, during the ‘Hundred Flowers’, not to mention their own youthful experience as student agitators – how quickly campus disorders, once ignited, could set the whole country aflame. This time, moreover, Chen Boda, evidently with Mao's approval, was publishing incendiary editorials which stoked the fire still higher. The usual recourse in such circumstances was to send in outside work teams, which carried out r
ectification and reorganised defective Party committees. This had already been done, as a stop-gap measure, at Beijing University. But was it what the Chairman wanted?
Liu and the other ‘first front’ leaders were out of their depth.
Mao was still in Hangzhou. He had not set foot in the capital since the previous November. Liu telephoned to ask him to return and take charge of the movement himself. Mao replied that he would remain in the south a little longer, and they should deal with the situation as they thought best. A few days later, Liu and Deng flew down to seek instructions directly. Mao gave the same response. This time he did vouchsafe that the use of work teams was not excluded, only ‘whether they should be sent or not sent, they must not be sent in hastily’.41 The phrase was ambiguous, and designedly so.
None the less, on that basis, teams of Party cadres and Youth League members were despatched to all institutions of higher learning in the capital and other large cities, under instructions to restore order and bring the movement under their control.42
This orthodox, top-down approach sat ill with the fiery exhortations being pumped out by the People's Daily and other newspapers. It also failed to acknowledge the students’ genuine grievances. At Chinese universities, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, the problems which the ‘Rightists’ had raised during the ‘Hundred Flowers’ had not only not gone away; they were now, in most cases, far worse. Mao's charges that Party bureaucrats at the universities behaved like ‘scholar tyrants’ resonated among those who had had to suffer their arbitrary whims. Incompetent staff members were protected; originality was repressed; cronyism and nepotism were rampant. The preferred method of teaching was still ‘duck-stuffing’ – as it had been in the 1930s – since rote-learning carried less political risk. Party and Youth League members got the plum job assignments; and, because the economy was still floundering, there were far fewer of those to go round.
Within days, conflicts developed. The work teams treated the student rebels as ‘anti-Party and anti-socialist elements’. The radicals held that Liu's men were ‘black gangsters’ in league with the ousted Party committees. By late June, nearly forty teams had been manhandled out of the campuses. In response, Liu branded thousands of students as ‘Rightists’ and struggle sessions were organised against their leaders. Faculty members who supported them were detained as counter-revolutionaries.43
In retrospect, it is hard to understand how Liu and Deng could have misjudged so fundamentally Mao's intentions.
At the time, however, the enormity of what the Chairman was contemplating was beyond the comprehension not only of his adversaries but even of his allies. That he had decided to unleash the masses against the Party itself was too far-fetched for any in the Politburo to believe. When radicals at Beijing University staged a struggle meeting at which Lu Ping and sixty other ‘black gang elements’ were forced to kneel, wearing dunce's caps, their faces blackened, clothes ripped, and wall-posters plastered all over their bodies, for students to pummel and kick, to yank their hair and bind them with ropes, before parading them through the streets, not only Liu Shaoqi but also Chen Boda and Kang Sheng declared it to be a ‘counter-revolutionary incident’ whose authors must be severely punished.44
While Mao concealed his hand, each tried to make sense in his own way of the events that were unfolding. To Liu and Deng, it was a sinister re-run of the ‘Hundred Flowers’, to ‘lure the snake out of its hole’ and expose those who retailed capitalist ideas, while at the same time teaching a lesson to youths who were hoodwinked by them. Chen Boda and Kang Sheng were beginning to understand that Mao was out to curb the power of Liu Shaoqi, but saw it as part of a renewed effort to radicalise policy, not as the start of an onslaught aimed at demolishing the Party system.
The time was fast approaching when they would all be disabused.
On July 8 Mao wrote to Jiang Qing from Wuhan:
Great disorder under heaven yields to great order. And after seven or eight years, great disorder starts all over again. Monsters and demons leap out. Given their class nature, they cannot do otherwise … I am confident, even though I doubt myself a bit. I always feel that when there are no tigers on the mountain, the monkey becomes king. That's how I became such a king … I am part tiger (that is the main part) and part monkey (that is secondary). I've already quoted [to you] a few sentences from the letter which Lu Gu of the Han dynasty wrote to Huang Zhong: ‘Whatever is tall bends easily. Whatever is white is easily soiled. The more difficult the song, the fewer are able to sing it. When a man is famous, it is hard for him to live up to his fame.’ Those last two sentences sum up my situation exactly … Things always go to the opposite extreme … The black band is trying to overthrow the Party and to overthrow me … Our present task is to overthrow the rightists (at least partially, for to do so completely is impossible) … In seven or eight years another movement will have to be launched to wipe out the monsters and demons, and that will be repeated many times in the future.45
Mao's trap was about to be sprung. Having spent the years since the Great Leap biding his time with the cunning of the monkey, it was time to become a tiger again.46 As he had told Kang Sheng, in Yan'an, a quarter of a century before: ‘Melons ripen. Don't pick them when they are not yet ripe. When they are ready, they will just drop off.’
*
On July 16, Mao swam for over an hour in the Yangtse near Wuhan, drifting nine miles downstream with the current. It was a demonstration of vigour, a metaphor for throwing himself back into the fray. Photographs of the 72-year-old Chairman's exploit were printed in all Chinese newspapers, and newsreels shown at cinemas.47
Two days later, without informing Liu Shaoqi, he flew back to Beijing.
That night, in a further snub, Mao, closeted with Chen Boda and Kang Sheng, refused to receive the Head of State.
Soon afterwards he told Liu that sending the work teams had been a mistake. Jiang Qing went to Beijing University, where she told radical students: ‘Whoever does not join us in rebellion, let him stand aside! Those who want revolution, stand with us!’ Chen Boda declared that the mass struggle session against Lu Ping had, after all, been a revolutionary, not a counter-revolutionary, event. On the 24th, Mao called for the work teams to be withdrawn altogether, describing Liu's policy as ‘an error of orientation’. Two days later, the members of the Cultural Revolution Small Group went to Beijing Normal University where, at a mass rally, they called on the students to ‘overcome all obstacles, liberate their thinking and carry out a thorough-going revolution’.48
At a rally of 10,000 teachers and students in the Great Hall of the People on July 29, Liu criticised himself for the work teams’ errors. But now there was an edge of resentment to his words, a dawning realisation that Mao had set him up. ‘You ask us how this [cultural] revolution should be run,’ he told them. ‘I tell you frankly, we don't know ourselves. I believe that many comrades of the Party Centre and many members of the work groups do not know.’ The result, he added pointedly, was that ‘even when you have made no mistakes, someone else says you have’. Deng and Zhou Enlai, who spoke before him, had explained the errors of the previous month as ‘old revolutionaries encountering new problems’ with which, as Zhou put it, ‘we were not familiar’. At that, Mao, who, unknown to them, was listening in a room nearby, snorted, according to his doctor: ‘Old revolutionaries! Old counter-revolutionaries is more like it!’ As the rally ended, Mao strode onto the stage to wild applause from the audience, ostentatiously ignoring both Deng and Liu.49
On August 1, the Chairman convened a Central Committee plenum – the first for almost four years – to approve the political and ideological basis on which the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution should be conducted.50 In his political report, Liu again acknowledged mistakes in the work teams’ approach. But, as before, he suggested that these resulted more from a lack of clarity (on the part, he implied, of Mao) than from any fundamental error in line. The debate that followed made clear that there was a good deal of
sympathy for his views.
Accordingly, three days later, Mao convened an enlarged meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, where he likened the sending of the work teams to the suppression of student movements by the northern warlords and Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang. Without naming them, he accused Liu and Deng of carrying out ‘an act of suppression and terror ’, and added menacingly: ‘There are “monsters and demons” among people present here.’ When Liu retorted that he was ready to assume responsibility, since he had been in charge in the capital at the time, Mao sneered: ‘You were exercising dictatorship in Beijing. You did a fine job!’.51
This inflammatory statement was immediately circulated as a conference document. Like his speech at Lushan, condemning Peng Dehuai, seven years before, Mao's anger left the plenum transfixed. That night Liu received a student work team at Zhongnanhai and told them: ‘I've made mistakes. You may expose them. You may expel me from the Party, you may remove me from office … It is right to bombard the headquarters’.52
The following day, Mao appropriated that phrase for a document he entitled, ‘Bombard the Headquarters! – my big-character poster’, which was distributed to the plenum on August 7. Since mid-June, Mao asserted, certain ‘central leading comrades’, who had opposed him on two previous occasions – in 1962 (over private farming) and in 1964 (over the Socialist Education Movement) – had been resisting the Cultural Revolution and trying to install a bourgeois dictatorship: ‘They have inverted right and wrong, and confused black and white. They have encircled and suppressed revolutionaries, and stifled opinions different from their own. They have practised White terror, glorifying capitalism and denigrating the proletariat. How venomous!’ The poster's title reinforced the attack by implying that the unnamed ‘leading comrades’ had formed a bourgeois headquarters within the Party.53
